"The Baby of Biological Race": The Issue of Racial Science in Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black

Abstract

Are there currently venerated works of history-writing that, upon closer inspection, should embarrass us for their entanglements with white supremacy? White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) by Winthrop Jordan is one such text. A weighty historical study of English and Anglo–American "thoughts and feelings" about people of African descent in the colonies and the early republic, Jordan's book has won great professional acclaim within the North Atlantic for more than half a century. Yet, for all of this reverence, White Over Black betrays a deep and fatal problem and deserves reassessment as a disturbingly retrograde contribution to the historiography on racism. This monumental piece of scholarship advanced an essentialist conception of race as part of nature, as arising from natural distinctions between groups of people. Guilty of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields have called "racecraft," Jordan put the cart of racial difference before the horse of racism. Indeed, he deliberately challenged the assumptions of contemporary anti-racist scholars who emphasized race as an invention, complaining that they had "thrown out the baby of race with the bathwater of racism." Maintaining that racism followed fundamentally from inherent racial difference, Jordan cast white supremacy, tragically, as an unconscious psychological response to the distinct physiology of Blackness. The result was a teleological narrative of racial domination. Though not intended to apologize for racism, White Over Black did nevertheless (ir)rationalize racism as the fatal product of inescapable biological difference. Carefully and critically read, Jordan's book provides an eloquent (pre)text for considering how a primordialist view of race subverts the project of effective anti-racist history-writing.